Thanksgiving on Tuesday.

They don't have Thanksgiving in England (obviously) so we decided to take a trip over Thanksgiving and have the traditional meal on Tuesday instead of Thursday. It was my first attempt at doing the entire thing by myself, and when I say the entire thing, I mean the basics. 

I discovered Turkey is something that is a bit tricky to find here, but Thanks to Costco I found not only a turkey, one that was stuffed with stuffing already, and not so much the entire bird, as just the part you want to eat. Gotta love Costco! 

I also made garlic mashed potatoes, gravy, roasted asparagus, green beans,  brown sugar sweet potatoes with marshmallows and a pumpkin cake for dessert. 

And I did all of this with a screaming Maddie clinging to my legs the entire time. 

 

 We had Dallin over since Daniella went back to Utah a few days before. 

 They have a drink over here that we LOVE called J20. Boston drank three of them. 

 Maddie loved every bite of her meal! I can always count on her to make me feel good about my cooking.

 Not sure what this face is about. 

 When she eats it gets everywhere! Hair, ears, bottom of her pants, toes, seriously everywhere! 

 The potatoes were a hit! I used an entire bag, and we cleaned them up! To be fair, the potatoes are much smaller here so we were lucky that we had enough. 

 Here's the turkey with the stuffing. Normally I think stuffing is the worst part of the meal, but this was actually very good. I don't know if I'll ever be able to make a regular turkey after this one. 

Here we are completely satisfied and ridiculously full. We didn't even touch the pumpkin cake. Which worked out because I ate it for basically every meal for the next 48 hours. :) 

This Thanksgiving I'm incredibly thankful for all the usual stuff (family, gospel, etc.) but I'm incredibly thankful to be an American! I know it sounds cheesy, but it's completely true. I feel so blessed to have been born in America!  

What's on your face?

(I'm having a hard time hearing the sound on these, so if you can't hear them either come back because you've got to hear it for the first video)

Holy cow! I'm pretty behind. I have so much I'd like to catch you up on, but barely any time with the laptop to actually do anything about it. Even now, I've only got 5 minutes before Chris leaves for work and takes the lap top with him. So I grabbed it and thought I'd put a little something on here.

These are my kids and this is what happens when I think they're playing quietly by themselves. Notice how innocent Boston sounds at the end. 

And here's a very short one of Maddie that I thought you'd all enjoy. I wish I could have gotten more but I ran out of room on my phone. 

Halloween

Oh Halloween. It was just not quite the same this year, but it was still a blast! In fact, I think I'm going to have to start having a Halloween party every year. I seriously LOVE Halloween!

 I was going to let Maddie be a BYU Cheerleader for Halloween this year, but then right before we left I found this little number, and I couldn't resist! I was just too cute! It had a hat, but the only time Maddie would wear it was when we were outside and it was raining. 

 Year three of this Dragon Costume! Talk about getting your moneys worth! He wears this ALL the time! People at Chris's work half expect to see Boston in this costume whenever they see us together, regardless of the time of year. If I had really pushed it, I'm sure he would have been Spiderman this year, but since I didn't, and since he still LOVES to dress up as a dragon, I let him.  You'll see it's getting a little small on him, but after three years of growing it's surprising that it still fits! 

 This is Gabe, the cutest (and best I might add) baby ever! He seriously makes me baby hungry! If only our kids came out as well behaved! 

 The whole crew before we went Trick or Treating in our apartment. I should have taken pictures, but I didn't think about it. I put the grown ups in each room connected to our hallway with three treats each. Then we got our grocery bags and went "trick or treating". At Maddie's room we got glow sticks, at Boston's room we got halloween bubbles, at our room Chris gave them Glow necklaces and at the living room they got Halloween balloons. It was really ingenious actually. 

 The glow sticks were a big hit. I took the kids in the hallway and we closed all the doors which makes it pitch black and we had a blast with the glow sticks! This is just Boston, Maddie, and Ally. 

 Notice the Green apparition on the left? What could be more Halloween than a ghostly appearance while playing in the dark? 

 After playing with the glow sticks the big kids decorated Halloween cookies, which somehow I didn't get any pictures of. Poor Maddie wants to be so much like them but isn't quite big enough yet so she gets left out a lot of the time. Luckily she was pretty entertained by the glow stick jewelry we made. At one point she had three glow necklaces and at least four glow bracelets. 

 We then carved/painted our halloween pumpkins! The kids thought this was the coolest thing ever and had a blast! 

 Boston and Maddie's pumpkin, hers didn't get painted, but we probably should have let her...oh well. Next year. 

 Morgan always makes Ally some kind of cool pumpkin each Halloween. Last year was Cinderella, the year before was Dora the Explorer. This year Peppa Pig made an appearance. It was seriously impressive. The kids thought he was quite the artist. 

 Isn't she the cutest witch EVER?

 Boston decided a plain old dragon wasn't cool enough, so he threw his super hero costume on over it. I I ask you what's more awesome than a super hero dragon?

 A super hero dragon and a super hero princess! 

 Here's Maddie with the witch hat. You can see she's thrilled about wearing it! 

Maddie loves to hang out in her super hero costume! She brings this to me most mornings and then runs around the house. 

Halloween night we went to the BletchlyWard's trunk or treat. It was pretty rainy, and we were positive it would be moved inside, but it wasn't. We all trick or treated in the rain and froze. Actually it wasn't as bad as it could have been. The rain went from pouring to a drizzle and the wind died down so it was bearable. This kids didn't care. They got Candy. Not good candy, but to kids sugar is sugar. I guess it worked out because with their candy being so gross, Chris and I didn't eat any. :)